ENS13-Primate Semantics

Primate Semantics

Philippe Schlenker

(LINGUAE, Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University)

Cogmaster, November-December 2013

Instructor: Philippe Schlenker

Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris

Global Distinguished Professor, New York University

Euryi Project Leader, ESF; Advanced Grant Leader, ERC

E-mail: philippe.schlenker@gmail.com

Topic

In the last 30 years, field experiments in primatology have yielded rich data on the morphology, syntax and semantics of primate alarm calls. To give but one (particularly rich) example: Ouattara et al. 2009a, b suggested that male Campbell's monkey calls (i) involve 4 roots (krak, hok, wak, boom), (ii) one suffix (-oo) which attaches to 3 of the roots (yielding krak-oo, hok-oo, wak-oo), and (iii) possibly one clear syntactic rule (boom appears sentence-initially); we will further suggest on the basis of more recent data that (iv) an explicit semantics can be devised for these calls, and that (v) it can account for apparent cases of dialectal variation among Campbell's monkeys. The goal of these sessions is to (i) review recent results on the communication systems of primates, especially monkeys, and (ii) to apply tools from formal semantics and pragmatics to them. This methodological goal is largely independent from the issue of the evolutionary connection between human language and these other communication systems – although in the long run detailed analyses of their formal properties should help illuminate the evolutionary question.

Requirements

Besides active class participation:

(i) read the assigned paper;

(ii) short exercises will be assigned.

Sessions and Readings (still tentative; to be adapted as we go)

Note: the readings and slides will be made available by way of a shared Dropbox folder. Please email the instructor to obtain the link.

Links

Primate Literature

Ofer Tchernichovski's lab

Klaus Zuberbühler's summary of Primate Communication

Tutorial on the dance language of bees

Initial References

(Some relevant articles will be made available by way of a shared Dropbox folder.)

Arnold, Kate, Lemasson, Alban, and Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2013, Population differences in combinatorial calling of wild Campbell's monkeys. Manuscript, University of St Andrews.

Arnold, Kate, Pohlner, Y., & Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2008, A forest monkeys alarm calls to predator models. Behavioral. Ecology and Sociobiology, 62, 549–559.

Arnold, Kate and Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2012, Call combinations in monkeys: Compositional or idiomatic expressions?, Brain and Language, 120, 3: 303-309, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2011.10.001.

Arnold , K & Zuberbühler , K: 2013, Female putty-nosed monkeys use experimentally altered contextual information to disambiguate the cause of male alarm calls. PLoS One , vol 8 , no. 6 , e65660 .

Berwick RC, Okanoya K, Beckers GJ, Bolhuis JJ.: 2011, Songs to Syntax: the Linguistics of Birdsongs. Trends in Cognitive Science 15(3):113-21

Cäsar, Cristiane, Byrne, Richard, Young, Robert J. and Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2012, The alarm call system of wild black-fronted titi monkeys, Callicebus nigrifrons Behav Ecol Sociobiol, 66:653–667

Cheney, Dorothy and Seyfarth, Robert: 1990, How Monkeys See The World: Inside The Mind Of Another Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chierchia, Gennaro, Danny Fox, and Benjamin Spector. To appear. The Grammatical View of Scalar Implicatures and the Relationship between Semantics and Pragmatics. In Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, ed. Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, and Klaus von Heusinger. Berlin, NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter.

Dyer, Fred D.: 2002, The Biology of the Dance Language. Annu. Rev. Entomol. 2002. 47:917–49

Fichtel C, Kappeler P. 2002. Anti-predator behavior of group-living Malagasy primates: mixed evidence for a referential alarm call system. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 51:262–275.

Fleiss, Joseph L.: 1981, Statistical Methods for Rates and Proportions. New York: John Wiley and Sons

Gautier, Jean-Pierre: 1989, A redrawn phylogeny of guenons based upon their calls – biogeographical implications. Bioacoustics: The International Journal of Animal Sound and its Recording, 2:1, 11-21

Gautier-Hion, Annie, Colyn, Annie and Gautier, Jean-Pierre : Histoire naturelle des primates d'Afrique Centrale, ECOFAC,‎ 1999 [pdf]

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Lemasson, A., Glas, L., Barbu, S., Lacroix, A., Guilloux, M., Remeuf, K., Koda, H.: 2011a, Youngsters do not pay attention to conversational rules: also in nonhuman primates? Nature Scientific reports 1, 22.

Lemasson, A., & Hausberger, M.: 2011, Acoustic variability and social significance of calls in female Campbell’s monkeys (Cercopithecus campbelli campbelli). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(5), 3341-3352.

Lemasson, A., Ouattara, K., Bouchet, H., Zuberbühler, K.: 2010, Speed of call delivery is related to context and caller identity in Campbell’s monkey males. Naturwissenschaften, 97, 11, 1023-1027.

Lemasson, A., Ouattara, K., Petit, E., Zuberbühler, K.: 2011b, . Social learning of vocal structure in a nonhuman primate? BMC Evolutionary Biology 11: 362.

Lemasson, A., Zuberbühler, K. & Hausberger, M.: 2005, Socially meaningful vocal plasticity in Campbell’s monkeys. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 119 (2), 220-229.

Lemasson A.: 2011, What can forest guenons « tell » us about the origin of language? In: Vilain A, Schwartz J-L, Abry C, Jauclair J, editors. Primate Communication and Human Language: Vocalisation, gestures, imitation and deixis in humans and non-humans. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 39–70.

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Ouattara, K., Lemasson, A. & Zuberbühler, K. 2009a. Campbell’s monkeys use affixation to alter call meaning. PLoS ONE, 4, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.

Ouattara, K., Lemasson, A. & Zuberbühler, K. 2009b. Campbell’s monkeys concatenate vocalizations into context-specific call sequences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., 106, 51, pp. 22026-22031

Ouattara K, Zuberbühler, N’Goran EK, Gombert J-E, Lemasson A, 2009c. The alarm call system of female Campbell’s monkeys. Anim. Behav. 78: 35–44.

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Seyfarth RM, Cheney DL, and Marler P.: 1980a, Monkey responses to three different alarm calls: evidence of predator classification and semantic communication. Science 210:801–803.

Seyfarth RM, Cheney DL, Marler P. 1980b.Vervet monkey alarm calls: semantic communication in a free-ranging primate. Anim Behav 28:1070–1094.

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Stephan C, Zuberbühler K.: 2008, Predation increases acoustic complexity in primate alarm calls. Biol Lett 4:641–644

C.N. Templeton, Erick Greene, Kate Davis, 2005. Allometry of alarm calls: black-capped chickadees encode information about predator size. Science 308:1934-1937

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